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Coyote Comms: Freedom of (Inoffensive) Speech - Transcript
Note: The provided lines are taken directly from the script. It has a near perfect correlation to the video. MTV News. PC culture, treating others with respect, social justice warriors—whatever you call it—isn’t prohibiting anyone’s freedom of speech. SpaceGuru5. (wild laughter) (Intro sequence. The music is "Fantasia II" by Johann Jakob Froberger.) SpaceGuru5. Hey guys. SpaceGuru5 here. It’s been far too long since I’ve done this. Have you all missed me? Anyway, as you might be able to tell from the title—no need to “mansplain” it to ya, hurr hurr—we’re gonna be talking about everyone’s favorite American societal issue, SJWs. In this day and age, it’s pretty much impossible to come across SJWs who misinterpret things as being offensive, even if it may not be offensive at all, on some site or another. While tumblr is a good example of where this behavior seems to flourish, you see it all over the place, including places like YouTube. Part of the discussion these SJWs force upon people—I mean, mention—is the idea of being politically correct, or PC. While it’s not necessarily a bad thing, many would argue that it’s gotten completely out of control in recent years. Some would say that it’s going against free speech. This leads us to this little video from MTV News that discusses how being PC isn’t against freedom of speech; they dare even say that it promotes newfangled vocabulary that’s been deemed as respectful and inclusive. What case will these people make for the mighty cause of the SJW? Well, let’s tune in and start slicing away. MTV News. From YouTube comments to presidential candidates, it seems a lot of people think freedom of speech is “under attack,” and who, might I ask, is to blame? “The goddamn PC culture!” If you’ve ever called out racism, sexism, ableism, or any other oppressive-ism, you’ve probably been accused of being “too PC.” SpaceGuru5. The only reason why this happens in the first place is because so many people misinterpret so many things as offensive and oppressive, even though they really aren’t at all. For instance, whenever a woman makes jokes about men’s behaviors, people generally find it funny. However, if a man makes jokes about women’s behaviors, there’s a resounding outcry of that person being a misogynist. These terms, and many others, are often thrown around like buzz words as a response to something they find offensive, so that’s why some people respond to such behavior as being too PC. That’s not to say that there aren’t cases where calling out oppression is justified, like when segregation was a thing or when people pressured the Government into arresting and deporting illegal Mexican immigrants, of which a few hundred were actual U.S. citizens, and the whole thing was called Operation: Wetback. However, when doing something as innocuous as making a joke and being called a racist or a sexist is more prevalent, can you really blame people for thinking being PC is a huge joke? MTV News. PC is, of course, short for politically correct. Political correctness is avoiding words or behaviors that exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against. Basically, treating people with respect. SpaceGuru5. Let’s go over some definitions provided by Dictionary.com. (I’ll leave this up for you guys to read.) According to these definitions, being PC has nothing to do with respect and has everything to do with avoiding things that people think are offensive. Now bear in mind that just because you think it’s offensive doesn’t mean it actually is offensive. Correlation is not causation. You have to also take into account the context and the source of the thing being said as well. You also have to know exactly what it means to be whatever it is you’re accusing that said thing of being. Going back to a previous example, a man making jokes about the way women behave is not an example of misogyny. Misogyny would be if that man said something like, “All women are pigs,” and meant it. That would be misogyny because that man would show that he is discriminatory against women. Meanwhile, the man joking about the way women behave probably doesn’t think that way at all. In fact, most of the time, he doesn’t. Just because you joke about something doesn’t mean you support going against that something. Again, correlation is not causation. I really gotta stop saying that. MTV News. Now, if you ask me, that doesn’t sound like a bad thing, but a recent poll by Fair Lee Dickinson University found that 68% of Americans and 81% of Republicans agreed that a big problem this country has is being politically correct. Even 62% of Democrats polled agreed that being PC is getting out of hand. For these folks, political correctness is synonymous with weakness or being overly sensitive. Similar to the new term ‘social justice warrior,’ calling someone PC is a way to derail and dismiss conversations about inequality. SpaceGuru5. It’s also a way to point out when someone is misinformed about inequality that might not even exist in the first place. Thanks to several amendments to the Constitution, egalitarianism has become legalized in all public facilities. This means that everyone, no matter who they identify as, has an equal opportunity to get somewhere in life. However, with things like Affirmative Action, there’s been a push for more so-called disadvantaged groups in public workplaces, putting odds more in favor of those groups just because they’re not straight white men. In other words, things like AA have actually allowed public places to be discriminatory against people over their sexual orientation, ethnicity, and gender by favoring the employment of everyone else over them. Were some of those people fit for the job? I’m not denying that. However, it’s also very possible that some of them were chosen over equally qualified or more qualified people just for being the way they are. The only reason why nobody sees this an inequality is because it’s in favor of groups who’ve been historically oppressed by the people now put at a disadvantage. It’s not necessarily reverse discrimination; it’s still discrimination. Tell me again how this isn’t a problem. MTV News. “Okay, PC police, you’re just offended by everything.” The term PC is almost always used as an insult. While it’s been around for a while, it gained popularity in the ‘80s when it caught on with conservatives, not liberals. So why is “being PC” used as an insult, and what, if anything, does it have to do with free speech? Here’s the thing: It’s not just about hurt feelings; it’s about calling out oppressive power structures, and that’s where the misunderstanding comes in. What’s perceived as being “too sensitive” is usually someone speaking out against lazy offensive language that doesn’t usually get challenged. SpaceGuru5. I was called out once for using the term Sonic fag in my first commentary on Guptill89. The person didn’t like that I used the word “fag” in such a way, even though I meant nothing discriminatory about it at all; I used it, like many others have, as a hyperbole to emphasize how much some delusional people really love the Sonic franchise. Like I said before: You need to understand the context of the situation before you say anything about it. How else do you think I’m able to do this commentary right now? MTV News. That’s because the group of people those words hurt historically haven’t had the opportunities to have their voices heard. And the people who call that being “too PC” are often in privileged positions and don’t want to or haven’t had to think about what they’re saying, or the consequences that come with it. SpaceGuru5. I love how the picture you put up of the privileged person is a straight white man. Yes, straight white men have historically been in privileged positions for most of Western history. However, thanks to egalitarian movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries, that’s been brought down to nonexistence. Sure, discrimination may still be a thing, but in public places it’s completely gone. We have the 14th and 15th Amendments in the U.S. Constitution for a reason, after all. MTV News. “You can’t take away my freedom of speech just because you’re offended!” Well, yeah. In America, freedom of speech simply means the Government cannot prohibit you from expressing yourself. It’s why you can criticize Obama without being thrown in jail. But on the interpersonal level, freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. Technically, no subject on Earth is off limits—you can say whatever you want—but in turn, people are allowed to respond however they want. The fact that you can comment means you’re not being censored. If you tell a crappy sexist joke and someone says, “Hey! That was a crappy sexist joke,” that’s freedom of speech. And if you post some racist bullshit on Facebook, and your boss decides she doesn’t want to employ people who spew racist bullshit on Facebook, you still have freedom of speech, and you’re free to take that racist bullshit somewhere else. America. SpaceGuru5. I have one question: What do you mean by “sexist” or “racist?” I know what it actually means to be sexist or racist, but that’s not what people want to associate things with. The main issue I have with PC culture is that people and ideas are labelled things, even if they’re not, over things that they feel are discriminatory and hate speech. That’s a problem because things like feelings are arbitrary and differ from person to person, so it makes no sense to try to do things without being offensive; there’s a solid chance that anything you do will be considered offensive by someone, and you’ll have to live with being labelled something you’re not for the rest of your life. Not to mention that the examples you gave here are weak examples. Your examples were someone telling a bad sexist joke and someone making what looks like a racist comment. If something’s a joke, then it’s obviously not meant to be taken seriously. There’s even the possibility that the person isn’t even taking what they’re saying seriously. Same with the latter example. Maybe the person was making a crude racist joke, and the boss—who, by the way, is a woman here. You’re not being inclusive, you sexist pigs!—wasn’t perceptive enough to get that it was a joke. Or, maybe the boss knows that it’s a joke but doesn’t want her employees to be making them. How are we supposed to know? The examples you gave here were incredibly vague, and they don’t paint us a full picture of what’s really going on. You’re gonna need more specificity to really show us what you’re advocating, because right now you’re just proving that all these SJWs see things with an unclear lens on reality. MTV News. PC culture, treating others with respect, social justice warriors—whatever you call it—isn’t prohibiting anyone’s freedom of speech. It’s mainly about people standing up for themselves and demanding to be spoken to and spoken about in a respectful way. In fact, political correctness is expanding free speech! We’re adding new words to the dictionary every year in an effort to promote more inclusive and respectful speech. Last year alone, the OED added micro-aggressions, mansplain, and a whole host of gender terms such as cisgender, agender, and genderfluid to the dictionary. That seems like giving more speech to more people. Not less. SpaceGuru5. Here’s the thing: Some of the terms you guys ear bashed the OED into adding were developed either out of offense or out of spite. For example, to mansplain something to someone is to simplify an explanation to the point where, theoretically, a man should be able to understand it.mansplain v. (of a man) explain (something) to someone, typically a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing. (OED) The reason why this is offensive is because using this term in this way assumes all men are stupid and incapable of any high level of intelligence, unlike women who just seem to get it straight away. If you’re gonna sit there and tell me something like that is more respectful than just “explain,” then you’re only further proving that PC culture is creating an imbalance in the opposite direction. Or look at terms like “cisgender,” which is basically a synonym for “straight” or “heterosexual.” The only reason we have these terms is because too many people find it offensive to say “being heterosexual is normal.” Apparently, the same word that means “what tends to happen” or “what is average” is offensive because it’s “non-inclusive...” (Certain chunks of text appear. They appear at the end of the respective spoken sections.) SpaceGuru5's Text. Here's an idea: Instead of making up new terms to try and make everyone feel like a special snowflake for being who they are, how about just calling everybody else a person instead of a label? I'm still waiting to be called a person instead of being labelled a cisgendered Hispanic male. SpaceGuru5. ...so we have to go and make up new terms just so we make everyone feel included. Because that’s what society is all about, just participation ribbons all around. Oh, you’re a certain way! Pat on the head.The last three sentences of this paragraph were ad-libbed and mimicked the words of A Dose of Buckley. SpaceGuru5's Text. I understand why things like this continue to happen, but I think that the efforts being done are inadvertently exacerbating the problem by treating people like labels instead of like people. You can have your own identity, and you can celebrate it all you want, but at the end of the day, every human being is still a person, and we're all just 7.5 billion people living on a giant wet rock floating through space. SpaceGuru5. So while PC culture isn’t exactly hampering freedom of speech, the only thing it’s effectively promoting is freedom of so-called “inoffensive” speech. America. And that’s the way this roadrunner runs. Though I have no real personal problem with being PC, the fact that so many people misinterpret things for the sake of being PC is something I have a major beef with. (If you couldn’t already tell...) The moment you start thinking about how others will think about you is the moment you stop thinking for yourself, and that to me is more restrictive than anything I’ve ever seen before. These people say that PC culture is helping free speech, though what’s really been done is that PC culture has bended free speech into something arbitrary and subjective. It’s like having a justice system where the jury only has to say you’re guilty in order to make you guilty, evidence notwithstanding. If that’s what freedom looks like, I’d rather be enslaved in the so-called offensive and oppressive world known as reality. The bottom line is that the world is not fair, but you can change it to make it more fair. Just be sure that the things you’re changing actually are fair instead of favoring historically oppressed groups and putting all other groups at a disadvantage. If you advocate for the latter, you shouldn’t dare call yourself an egalitarian. Now, yes, I understand that there could be a misunderstanding on both sides. Some people may really not be aware that they’re being racist or whatever, and some people may not know what real racism looks like. With that said, don’t you think that, instead of just assuming things all the time, people should just know what things are? Ah, who am I kidding? We’re the same nation that spawned anti-vaxxers, so it really doesn’t matter if we know things anymore. Truly our society is quickly going to Hell. That’s about it for today, folks. This is SpaceGuru5, and I’ll see y’all later. I wonder how many people are gonna misinterpret everything I’ve said. Can’t wait to see the comments!These sentences were ad-libbed. (Outro sequence. The music is the final notes of "Warm Winter, Cool Summer" by SpaceGuru5.) Notes Category:Transcripts